


What You Don't Surrender

by monimala



Category: The Originals (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, F/M, Future Fic, Gap Filler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 04:19:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11455854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monimala/pseuds/monimala
Summary: Set after the events of the season four finale.There must’ve been a trauma. Something that made him forget everything but his first name. He cannot begin to consider what it was, but he sees the mirror for it in the woman’s eyes. Whatever regrets he has, she has them, too.





	What You Don't Surrender

It’s the third night in a row that she’s come to hear him play. A tourist, Amelie confided when she came by to top off his Bordeaux. Only in Manosque for the week. Already he’s noticed that she tips well and says little and is the very last to leave. Her eyes are huge and dark, drowning pools, and they never leave his face or his fingers. He flows from Bach to Bowie to Beethoven to Bruce Springsteen, and she leans forward, bending shadows around her lovely face. He wonders what she hears, what she sees. It cannot be him. He’s no one. A piano player nearly as new to the town as she. He pays his rent in cash, takes his meals in cautious sips, and drifts on the wind. Portugal and Spain and now the south of France. 

Sometimes Elijah thinks that he is on an apology tour, for the word “sorry” is at the forefront of his curiously empty mind. But he speaks it aloud to no one, and it echoes across the spare and sterile recesses of his brain. There must’ve been a trauma. Something that made him forget everything but his first name. He cannot begin to consider what it was, but he sees the mirror for it in the woman’s eyes. Whatever regrets he has, she has them, too.

One hour blends into the next. Couples come and go, wine-drunk and giddy on human joys and human sorrows. The stranger stays, her whisky untouched and her thirst unquenched. She is like him in this way as well, he realized on the first night. Vampire. Damned for eternity. The rippling awareness only makes him feel more alone, more transient. They are solitary hunters, after all. There is no such thing as a pack or a family. Just the tenuous, fragile, acknowledgment that he and this woman will still be walking the earth long after the other patrons of this dimly lit bistro are dead.

At 3:30 in the morning, she slips a hundred U.S. dollars into his half-filled brandy globe. The gesture is familiar, not just because she’s done it twice before, but because another creature like them was similarly generous some eight weeks ago. It’s a strange impulse for charity he seems to inspire in his fellow undead. And tonight he wonders just how far it extends. 

“Thank you,” he tells her with a courteous nod. He expects her to vanish without a reply once again, but she pauses there by his tip jar, worrying her lush lower lip with her sharp white teeth. 

The bar is quiet save for Amelie, Luc and the busboys clearing and closing. Were she human, he would hear her nervous breaths, each inhalation like a gunshot as she weighs her options. He does feel the thrum of her heartbeat. No mere shot. No, it’s veritable cannon fire.

“Can I do something for you?” he asks her in the language of his latest port. 

“Come back to my room,” she demands in a low, husky voice that brooks no argument. The firm order does not perturb him or offend his masculine sensibilities. Had she phrased it as a polite proposition, his answer would’ve been “oui, bien sûr.”

She waits for him to pocket his earnings and put his instrument to rights and to rest. Patient but not calm. Tension rolls from her in waves. Dressed head-to-toe in black leather, pale-skinned and brunette, she could easily be mistaken for a Parisienne. But the “fuck you” set of her shoulders is distinctly American, as much of a giveaway as her Creole French. 

Her scent, too, is unique. Magnolias mixed with something rich and spicy that whispers on the edge of his memory as they walk down the cobblestone street to the rooms she's let. He wants to press his mouth to her throat, taste it and name it, with an intensity that shocks him. He's taken lovers before, of course. He is no monk. Even the idea of chastity and piety leaves him unsettled. But the fierce wanting for this nameless woman is something more than a simple lust to be slaked. It’s an ache so powerful that it humbles him in a way religion never could. 

Just before they cross the threshold to her boardinghouse, Elijah catches her wrist. He pulls her toward him, sliding his free hand around the back of her neck as though he's done it a thousand times before. She allows him the liberty, again as if it's his due. And she gives her lips to him with the same ease of motion. They've not spoken since leaving the bistro, not agreed upon terms, but the kiss is a hungry dance of her dominance and his submission. Her fingers curl into his shirtfront. She slams him against the door, nearly splintering it. He opens to her, sucking on her hot tongue as if only her mouth can give him sustenance and succor. 

Perhaps that is the truth. Perhaps this stranger is not so strange after all, for she knows just how to touch him and the precise angle at which to slant her kisses. She takes his blood with a few cuts of her teeth. He takes hers with the slice of one incisor. She is not just vampire, he understands then. She's something else, something more. Perhaps she’s born of nightmares...or of the dreams he can’t recall. Elijah's head grows light. His knees, too. He is glad for the door, for the wall and then the railing on the narrow stairs.

When they finally reach her bed, her fever ebbs, taking their pace from violent and frantic to achingly slow. She sighs, hiding her face in the crook between his neck and shoulder. Her ink-dark hair spills across his bared skin like silk. His shirt hangs off him in ribbons and he cannot say he minds. He undresses the rest of the way in silence. She shrugs off her leather armor, revealing a taut warrior's body etched with scars. He knows bite wounds, he knows the slash patterns made by knives, though he cannot begin to explain why. Fortunately, in this moment, he does not have to. 

“Fuck me,” she gasps. And all he has to do is obey. 

They fall to the sheets like partners in an age-old ballet. No, like partners in a sparring match. She meets his every move, his every thrust and parry. For his part, Elijah revels in the heat of her cunt, in the velvet grip of it as he slides deep, and in the flutter of her clitoris beneath his thumb. He knows just how much pressure to apply to make her arch and mewl. He knows that the curve of her left breast is especially sensitive. And that licking and nipping at the soft flesh just behind her ear will push her over the edge to orgasm. How...when he's never made love to her before? And how can she cry out his name when he hasn't told her what it is? Elijah comes hard, with a groan and a shudder, and the answers to his questions don't come at all.

Her thighs are still sticky with his release and his cock is still wet with hers when she whispers, “Please leave. You need to go.”

Elijah salvages what clothing he can and does as she asks, stopping just inside the doorway to turn and look at her one last time. Her beautiful face is turned away from him, but even in profile he can see the sheen of tears on her cheeks. Perhaps he fucked her too hard. Perhaps he didn’t fuck her hard enough. The ghosts that brought her to his piano remain. Just as his chase him down the stairs and back out into the pre-dawn darkness. 

She does not return to the bar on the fourth night or the fifth. He doesn’t expect her to. 

On the sixth night he remembers that her name is Hayley. And he finally understands what he’s been sorry for all this time: He is Elijah Mikaelson, he’ll burn down the world to protect his family, and nothing—not even death itself—can keep him from the people he loves.


End file.
